The reasons for the development effort behind the present invention are closely connected with the goals of TQM (Total Quality Management), especially with the need to support the following goals:
Customer satisfaction and trust to be achieved by a reliable, customer-oriented service at a competitive price/performance ratio. PA1 Employee satisfaction and motivation to be a result of job transparency by formal task descriptions, clear communication channels and defined escalation procedures. PA1 Organization productivity improvement to come from running streamlined operations with straightforward responsibilities, well-defined internal and external interfaces and centralized control of documentation. PA1 Revenue growth and profit increase to be assisted by selling TQM services to external customers. PA1 ISO9000 Registration to be obtained, based on innovative methods making one's TQM environment a show-case example. PA1 Support of Daily Operation PA1 Support of Employee Training PA1 Support of Management Decisions PA1 Support of ISO9000 Registration PA1 business operation structure in terms of organization-related processes PA1 roles people or systems/utilities are playing within the business operation PA1 external roles interfacing with the business operation PA1 business operation structure in terms of workflow related procedures PA1 details of procedures in terms of activities and their work instructions PA1 qualification requirements for people and functional requirements for systems/utilities PA1 agreed standards for information exchange among roles and/or external roles PA1 agreed standards for services provided to other business operations PA1 forms and checklists used in the business operation PA1 access to related information PA1 communication exchange within the business operation and with other business operations.
One of the important aspects of so-called "Total Quality Management" is a good understanding of the business supplying products and services to customers. This understanding may be demonstrated and propagated into the day-to-day operation by user friendly, always up-to-date documentation of the particular Business Systems which sets definitions and standards for quality in terms of objective and measurable evaluation criteria. By continuously observing, evaluating and benchmarking the real business operation against the documented case, a steady improvement towards a desired zero fault operation may be gradually achieved. At the same time, the documentation may undergo changes based on new insights and desired improvements. The ultimate goal of such an incremental improvement process should be a simplified and transparent business operation demonstrably saving costs by avoiding errors and contributing to satisfaction of both customers and employees.
The real life complexity of business operations and the dynamics of omnipresent system changes present the main obstacle in the successful implementation of the above-specified goals. The traditional ways of documenting and distributing the business related information (handbooks, management directives, etc.) can hardly keep pace with the real life changes. In addition, it is very difficult to precisely document and maintain the detailed flow of information, and to provide consistent views of interrelated entities in an ad hoc manner. Consequently, a certain systematics of quality defining and efficiently supporting all necessary analysis and documentation steps (business operation/system modeling, information flow analysis and its simulation, structure of documents with their mutual relationships, documentation access, distribution, change control, etc.) must be established.
By considering the above requirements, one may arrive at the following problem statement: How to build up and maintain a user-friendly documentation of a business operation which supports a real and continuous quality improvement?
The traditional approach to create/maintain process-related and quality-related documentation is based on a more or less arbitrary set of templates. The templates are manually filled with information using document/text processing software. These documents may then be distributed either in a printable or electronic form, or made available on-line for download by the end user. In a more modern version of this approach, the documents may be converted to one of the Web formats and linked to a Web browser page, for example. In sum, the traditional approach is rather ad hoc, mostly manual and not systematic.
Another approach (sometimes used in connection with ISO9000 Registration) is to provide an integrated set of documents linked together by a predefined quality manual template. The quality manual template serves as the administrator's interface for the data entry. However, the terms of these documents are often ill-defined (or not well defined and ambiguous).
Restated, many definitions by the ISO8402 and ISO9000 Standards are imprecise and problematic for purposes of practical implementation of a quality system by most traditional approaches. For example, the ISO8402 and ISO9000 Standards define "Quality System" as the organizational structure, responsibilities, procedures, processes and resources for implementing quality management; and defines "Quality loop, quality spiral" as a conceptual model of interacting activities that influence the quality of a product or service in the various stages ranging from the identification of needs to the assessment of whether these needs have been satisfied. However, the ISO9000 Standard does not define the terms "process", "procedure", "activity" and "instruction".
As a consequence, it is difficult to establish a "conceptual model" of "interacting activities" which depends on the definition of "process", "procedure" and "activity", and which depends on the relationships of (i) "process" to organizational structure, (ii) process to business communication (information exchange) and (iii) "process" to "activities" and "instructions". Thus, there is an inconsequent and intermixing usage of these terms in traditional approaches (including the foregoing) and traditional process related documentation.
To this applicant's/inventor's knowledge, none of the current approaches takes an integral view of the documentation problem complexity. This means starting with the conceptual model of interacting activities (i.e., definition of all necessary terms and relationships among participating business related entities), implementing the model in a relational database and automation software which is capable of generating complete documentation with automatically maintained mutual cross-references, and providing a clear methodology to direct the information flow analysis and data collection steps, as in the present invention. Further details and description of the present invention are provided later.
In order to appreciate the major distinguishing features of the present invention approach in comparison with the traditional ways, one has to examine typical work during the life cycle of the resulting documentation. In particular, the steps of data acquisition, classification, and structuring, the phase of original documentation creation and its ongoing maintenance, as well as its presentation to the end user must be examined.
Data Acquisition, Classification and Structuring:
The traditional approach is mostly specifying the information items in an ad hoc manner, emphasizing the isolated point of view of the information provider; this generally applies to information item contents as well as its format. No (or little) consideration is given to the question of each information item's relationship to the surrounding information, possible contents overlapping and/or inconsistencies.
The present invention considers all information items in context of the established conceptual/relational model. Depending on the information item (i.e., entity instance) definition and its predefined entity relationships, the information provider is often directed to supply the specific contents only, without worrying much about its format. The redundancy and consistency problem is controlled by the documentation administrator using support of the powerful model and various provided tools. The Data Analysis Methodology of the present invention also proposes the right questions to ask during the data acquisition step, thus substantially improving the overall quality and conciseness of the resulting documentation. By accepting that the exchange of communication (i.e., information flow) is the controlling agent which uniquely defines the workflow of activities, the generation of workflow of arbitrary complexity may be fully automated by the present invention.
Documentation Creation and Maintenance:
The traditional approach assigns the responsibility to write and update complete documents to the information provider who, when consequently using established rules and well-designed templates, may be able to keep a certain internal consistency of format and presentation. However, because of the obviously limited view of and influence on the related surrounding information, contents overlapping and/or inconsistencies may still occur. The quality and usefulness of the resulting documentation strongly depend on the individual contributor, and the amount of analysis and maintenance work invested.
The present invention approach does not typically require the information provider to write complete documents; rather it collects clearly structured pieces of data from the individual contributor which serve as the database-resident building blocks in the automatic document composition step. A very important advantage of the present invention is the automatic handling of all links to the surrounding information which are kept in the database and extracted to the resulting documents. The documentation maintenance is monitored (e.g., expiration dates) and controlled by the documentation administrator.
End User Presentation:
The traditional approach to provide end user access to on-line documentation (Applicants disregard, for this comparison, the option of printed document distribution) is to manually create the end user interface structuring and listing the individual documents and supporting either on-line or off-line loading of the desired document. This may work well for a relatively static situation in which the structure and amount of documents do not change rapidly. For complex and highly dynamic information systems, however, the manual maintenance of the interface which must also support numerous relationships among various documents cannot cope with the problem at hand. As a result, even an originally consistent information system deteriorates over time and loses its usability.
The present invention approach delegates the creation of the end user interface to an automated mechanism which uses the structural information existing in the relational database. The preferred embodiment creates (a) the so-called Daily Operation Interface providing a simplified view of the documentation structure, and (b) the so-called Relational Navigator Interface supporting full access according to the relational model. Based on the actual database contents in the moment of the specific documentation release, a corresponding on-line interface is dynamically generated and made available.